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This spring I had the fortunate opportunity to travel to 4 different countries for a little over a month. I purchased a few rolls of Kodak Ektar 100 Professional exclusively to use while I was abroad. I used the film with my Canon AE-1 Program. I mainly took photos in bright outside settings as it was late summer and just extremely hot in most of the places that I visited. I only used one lens which was 75-150mm.

I don’t spend as much time as I should in actual San Francisco as I should. I feel like just driving across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to SF is just too much for me and just thinking about the toll and traffic makes me angry. This is why I have been making a little more of an effort to try to spend more time stepping out of my little area and exploring the greater places around me.

Earlier in the year I went out with a ton of cameras and took some great pics along the Golden Gate Bridge and the surrounding area. I took the Yashica-A and managed to take both color and black and white photos. I have yet to develop the color, but here are the black and white ones that I think came out best. It was a somewhat clear day on the San Francisco side of the bay so I think the pictures came out pretty sharp.

A few weeks ago I was able to try out some Cinestill’s 50Daylight film in a very cute small town in Northern California called Winters. I also am excited to work in a collaboration with TOBI. They sent me some pieces from their latest collections that my cousin and I wore while testing out this lovely film.

I really wish I had some Barbies lying around so I could have used to shoot with this camera, but alas they at home at my parents in a box, and I have no reason to actually own any at this point in my life. The Barbie camera itself though needs no justification to own. It is in all reality just a different colored Onestep 600 Polaroid.

So if you have been reading my blog for some amount of time then you know that Fujifilm discontinued making it’s pull apart earlier this year in February. Making thousand of vintage cameras obsolete and into large paper weights 🙁 You can read more about my at the below linked post

There was a petition and letters sent to Fujifilm to no avail. But a company called New55 started a Kickstarter to essentially bring back the film and that is what this post is all about. I know this is last minute, but time ran away from me and I was not able to post sooner. I just wanted to briefly recommend contributing to their campaign to try to keep peel apart film alive and save millions of cameras. The film they are currently developing is 4×5 peel apart that can be used with Polaroid 545 backs.

For the most part I test out cameras, clean them and then list them on Etsy so they can find new homes. Sometimes I love my tested cameras so much that I add an extra roll inside of them and see if I can take more amazing shots. Then I wind up selling the camera and I have half a roll still inside that I need to shoot. That’s what happened with this particular roll. I had a customer that really needed the camera ASAP, so I shot the rest of the roll inside my apartment.

In all honestly I also have a new Lomography Diana Mini and a Diana-F+, which I learned to use first and then I dabbled in using this older baby. The design has essentially stayed the same and you can find solace in it’s simplicity. The camera is purely plastic and does feel very toy like in your hands. Everything is manual and the plastic viewfinder does not do you any favors. You can line up some picture perfect moments and then miss them because you forgot to take off your lens cap 🙁 But the lo-fi vibe and vignetting on your photos make your pics seem older and richer at the same time.

The Diana-F Camera

The Diana-F and was introduced after the Original Diana as the model that could take a flash. Simple enough I guess the F stands for flash. The Diana was first manufactured in the early 1960’s by a company called the Great Wall Plastic Factory. They would mainly make the camera as novelty items and giveaways for companies. Hence there are many privately labeled and clone versions out there. The Diana-F takes 120 film and should produce 16 4 x 4 cm images. As mentioned before the camera was made of plastic with a black body and dark minty blue top.

Before using this camera I had never used a TLR camera. I do have one of those that are plastic and your put together yourself, but I am lazy and I have not gotten around to building it yet. :/ So there was a bit of a learning curve trying to use this Yashica. I was constantly turning the wrong knob on the side and advancing the film instead of focusing, so my first roll was not used to it’s full potential. I also found the viewfinder pretty dim at times and struggled to see if I was in focus. I was pleasantly surprised when my film scans came back that the camera does take sharp and bright photos.

Since I am an Impossible Member, I sometimes get emails to try out some of their experimental film or film that is still in the early stages before it goes into mass production. I have reviewed some of their other film in the past and you can check two of them out below:

I think both of those films were pretty great and they were a lot of fun to work with. The Impossible Project has made some other experimental films in between which I have regrettably missed out on, so I jumped at the chance to try this new film they are calling Duochrome Black & Red Film. They claim it is a similar formula as their regular black and white film, which is my favorite. I like it because it develops much more quickly than their color film and is much less sensitive to the elements, such as temperature and light.